Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.
Newfangled online sites like 'Business Insider' and 'Huffington Post' built businesses they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by ripping off the work of more talented journalists and then playing Google's digitally native games better than the old fogeys ever could.
For years now, we've been hearing about how China is the great copycat nation, the manufacturer of designs drawn up in other countries, and then an imitator for its own products. That's been true, as the developing country followed a path that Japan and then Korea plowed before it.
Should Ford succeed in equipping all its cars with information that gets communicated back to its servers, it will become a 'big data' company, a beyond-vehicles opportunity that is as promising as it is murky.
The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.
Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.
Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers' doors and deliver packages. It's pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness.
I confess that, like public figures from bygone days or an entertainer that hadn't been heard from in eons, I didn't know AIM, as we all called it, still existed at all.
As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.
One of the world's most successful and yet mysterious companies in the world, Samsung Electronics, has been operating without its leader for months and likely will continue to do so for some time to come.
What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it's not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.
When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.
Apple is so secretive internally, they keep secrets from each other.
Salesforce acquires companies - it has snapped up 55 since 2006 - that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn't yet cracked.
Broadcom is the descendent of a nearly 60-year-old unit of the original Hewlett-Packard. Semiconductor companies are like enterprise software companies: they don't die easily.
When I was a senior in college, I attended an inspiring conference at West Point called the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs, which paired political science majors with cadets in the hopes of building future civilian-military relationships.
